The PlayStation 2 officially launches… in Brazil?

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Book a vacation to the sunny beaches of São Paulo and if you can somehow train your mind to peer past the shrouding veil of be-thonged Brazilian rollerbladers, you will actually see a thriving video gaming economy. Brazil is filled with native gamers and hundreds of shops across the country purvey to them. Name a system and you can find it somewhere: the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3, the Nintendo Wii are all available. But not officially. Which give us today’s rather bizarre headline: Sony Computer Entertainment of America have just announced that they are officially launching the PlayStation 2 in Brazil.

If it seems weird that a console nearly a decade old has just been “officially” launched in the eighth largest economy in the world, that’s because it is. Even weirder, the console — which you could easily buy for under $100 in America, new — will cost Brazilians R$799 ($445), with games costing either R$119 ($66) or R$99 ($55).

Bizarrely, this puts Sony in competition with itself in Brazil, where import PS2s can be bought for far less at any shop, already moodded with custom chips allowing gamers to play pirated games, which can be purchased at numerous corner stalls for only $2 to $3 a disc.

Piracy’s not the reason Sony’s been so hesitant to release the console in Brazil: it’s the result. In actuality, Brazil’s own laws are so prejudiced towards goods made by the local economy that exported goods end up having huge import taxes levied upon them. It’s sad, because Brazil is a country that really loves games: the original Sega Megadrive is still popular in Brazil. Any console manufacturer worth its salt would want the Brazilian market, but until Brazil changes its laws, pirates and piracy are the only reasonable alternatives to exorbitant fees and taxes.